HEALING THE HEARTACHE:
As the ABC’s Landline celebrates 30 years of telling the stories of rural Australians, host Pip reveals it was those same people who helped her heal in a time of overwhelming grief.
how Landline presenter Pip Courtney found healing after unbearable grief
The eucalyptus trees cast long shadows in the late afternoon. A hot wind ruffles the grass. Curious cattle rush bellowing to the fence, ears twitching, hooves stamping, loudly wanting to know what is going on. In the distance the city of Brisbane shimmers in a heat haze, but here in the rolling, pastoral pocket of Pinjarra Hills, Pip Courtney looks as cool as a mint julep walking down a track with Bella, a resident horse of uncertain temperament.
Bella is being coaxed into posing for the camera by the sugar lumps Pip has stashed in her pocket. The two are old friends. Landline’s esteemed presenter comes here to the University of Queensland’s Veterinary Science Farm every Wednesday to stand among the corrugated iron sheds and wooden fences to film the links for each program. In fact, the queen of rural Australia has been standing in paddocks with cameras and animals for three decades, often filming early in the morning when the light is soft, or in the golden hour of the evening in those moments of luminescence before it tips towards dark. “You’ve got to make every minute count,” she says. “The light is only great for a certain amount of time.”
Landline is much more than a job for Pip; it is a vocation, it is the fibre of her being, it is a community spread across the country that embraced and held her when the worst thing happened. It is home.
“I still get a thrill putting the key in the door of the three-star hotel room in the middle of rural Australia,” she admits. “If you end up with a job you love, it is better than winning Lotto. I always thought it would be the right time to go if I could see someone sitting in my chair and not want to kill them. At the moment, if I imagine someone at my desk, I do want to kill them!”
The job, the deadlines, the kindness of that community and her colleagues were what kept her stumbling forward when her ABC cameraman husband, John Bean, was tragically killed in a helicopter crash on August 18, 2011, while working in South Australia.
“Deadlines are not changeable,” Pip says now of how she kept putting one foot in front of the other in the wake of unimaginable loss. “So I just set crazy deadlines and worked like mad, and that helped me.”
“She works incredible hours,” says her former boss Ben Hawke, “just from dawn to dusk and well beyond. She will be researching and working on her transcripts late into the night, smoking cigarettes and drinking Diet Coke.” Not being a coffee or tea drinker, Pip admits she is addicted to Diet Coke to pep her up.
“The reporters have a quota of stories that they’re expected to do each year,” Pip’s executive producer Cathie Schnitzerling says, “and she insists on doing the same quota as well as presenting the program, even though she doesn’t have to. She is a true journalist who wants to be equal to everyone else.”
“John used to growl at me about it,” Pip admits. “My mum’s name is Robin and my dad Michael was a workaholic, and [John] would say, ‘I feel like Robin half the time.’”
Landline viewers might be surprised by what they don’t see of Pip on camera. The bling, the discreet diamonds, the rings on every finger. The pink socks. The startling amount of pink in the wardrobe she brings for The Weekly’s photo shoot. Pip Courtney, who strides across the landscape in jeans, boots, work shirts and an Akubra hat, is a pink person. Her clipboard is pink – even her washing basket is pink. “I remember a blinds salesman saying to me once, ‘You sure you want to go with the pink blinds, love?’. ‘Yep,’ I said.”
And well, you have just got to say this straight out, she is a cat person, the adoring owner of Burmese cats. She hesitates slightly: “It is controversial with farmers, who sometimes reckon the best place for a cat is in a crayfish pot at the bottom of the ocean.”
John used to tease her about being “the scruffiest reporter in Australia”. He once gave her a book on make-up for Christmas. You had to be careful with John, she says. He started buying his Christmas presents in January and if you happened to mention that you liked something, there it would be on Christmas day. “His diary was full of birthdays and he was always looking for perfect presents. He was a good friend to people.”
But these (more glamorous) days, Pip’s shirts have a bit of a social media following of their own. “My default setting is definitely jeans and boots and a nice shirt. But I do love getting dressed up, for the Logies or Rural Woman of the Year. I like nice clothes.”
She is a seriously good cook, too. “Next level,” declares Cathie. A connoisseur of French champagne, “she loves to entertain, loves to have people around to her house”.
Pip was always going to be a journalist. Her father was a highly respected journalist and editor of The Examiner in Launceston. A newspaperman who stood up for his community, she says “there was always something he was fighting for”.
He was a man who enjoyed words, and Pip was reading the world’s most elegant writers in The New Yorker from an early age. “When we were at primary school and everybody got those pictures out of The Women’s Weekly for their schoolbook covers, we all had New Yorker covers.”
Michael would take her into the office on Saturdays, and she loved it. Instead of a pop star, teenage Pip had a picture of political correspondent Michelle Grattan on her bedroom wall. “Because I wanted to be [her]. Dad just talked endlessly about her.”
Although she grew up in the ’burbs of Launceston, she relished visiting her step-grandad and grandmother’s farm. “I loved the chickens and the horses. And I followed my step-grandfather around like a puppy, apparently. He was quite grumpy and scared most of his grandchildren. I loved sitting up in the Land Cruiser asking questions. He was very proud of his sheep, and I have an enduring love of sheep. He always said, ‘They’re not dumb. They have the brain that they need to do what sheep do, and we have to work out how to think like a sheep.’”
When she was seven, Pip decided to move in with Grandma. “I dragged a little stool over to Grandma’s phone and rang Mum and Dad and asked if I could live with Grandma because she needed me and they had [her brother and sister] Nick and Becs. So I didn’t
“John was always looking for perfect presents. He was a good friend to people.”
think they’d miss me. I was quite surprised when they said no.”
And there were always ponies and horses. “I would be off riding and I never told Mum or Dad where I was going,” she says. “I would come back at the end of the day. I had a one-eyed pacer [and] a polo pony that only did stop and flat gallop, and you couldn’t catch it. And then on my first day of work, I bought a horse for a dollar and my dad was appalled. He was a thoroughbred who had won 18 races, but was starving in a paddock. I got him well again. Dad said, ‘You will never have any money.’ And I didn’t.”
From the age of 21, “every spare minute” was spent with her horses. “Then I had a fall 20 years ago, broke my shoulder and lost my nerve. But I still love them.”
Pip studied politics at the University of Tasmania, graduating with an Arts degree. Starting as a cadet at the ABC, she did not, by her own admission, show early promise; her childhood devotion to The New Yorker possibly didn’t help in the quick and dirty world of television news.
“I didn’t really have a concept of the nitty-gritty of a story. It took me a while to get that. I was overthinking it like an English literature assignment.” In tears, she rang her father and said, she was going to be a wool classer. “He sent me a book written by one of his mates who worked at The Advertiser in Adelaide. And then I got it.”
Pip worked in TV news, covering courts – “weirdly I loved courts, it was Shakespearean” – and sport, and then in 1993 everything coalesced when she got a job at Landline. She became the presenter in 2012, and John was the cameraman on her first story. Going from news to longform reporting, she was completely lost. “He said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’” she recalls now. John took Pip under his wing and taught her about story arcs, crafting and pacing for emotion. “He used to tell me I was good at my job and gave me confidence when I didn’t have any in myself. Journalism is a confidence game, and he was my greatest champion.”
Pip became known as the “codger whisperer”. “Any old bloke over 70,
I can get them to do whatever I want,” she laughs. “It is a skill I have yet to monetise. But there is nothing I like more than yarning with an 80-yearold. They often feel that they are not being listened to.”
She loves interviewing farmers, the innovators, the risk takers. “You can’t be a farmer if you’re risk-averse. You have to have an appetite for risk and backing yourself when something goes wrong, just keeping on going. I know I could not be a farmer. I get nervous if I’ve got five grand on a credit card.”
Pip would go on to win numerous awards, including the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists’ Star Prize for her two-part series on coal seam gas. She’d been to Texas to attend the Federation’s conference two years earlier.
“It was so exciting to be in a roomful of journalists from around the world who love what you love,” she says. In three decades she has seen tremendous changes in agriculture. “They say they look after the animals and it’s a much more holistic approach – it is astonishing and heartening. The number of farms that have Land for Wildlife signs on their gates and farmers will say, ‘Let me show you my family of eagles or a nest of bandicoots. We have built special enclosures and they are coming back.’”
John had a girlfriend when he and
“I get more hugs than any girl has ever gotten in her life from these lovely farmers.”
Pip met. It would be a couple of years before he was single and they went on a road trip to cover the Deni Ute Muster for Landline. A year later he proposed, and they would have 12 years together. When we meet at the farm, it’s clear Pip still struggles to talk about their life together and the impact that
John’s death still has on her.
But in the weeks following our interview, she offers more of the fragments – the memories, all the small pieces, the funny stories, the snapshots – that made up their life together.
When they were first together John was working on The Arts Show. “He called me his dirty little secret because I only liked hunting prints,” she smiles. Once he’d wrapped that program, however, “I took him out to do a story on lentils,” Pip says. “And he said, ‘You brought me all this way to shoot pubic hair in a paddock,’ because dried-off lentils looks like a pubic hair. I said, ‘Make it look good.’” And he did, because he always did. “It didn’t matter what shoot he was on, whether it was for a news story for Landline or Australian Story, he gave it his all. As a husband, he was the same. I was loved and cherished; it was a gift and I adored him in equal measure. I feel like I lost everything.”
John hadn’t wanted to make that final trip to Lake Eyre with Paul Lockyer and Gary Ticehurst – who also lost their lives – to film the miraculous beauty of the salt pans flooding. That morning he had been to the funeral of a friend. He was emotional. “He cried on the morning he left and said he didn’t want to go, it was going to be too long. He had done long trips before, all over the world, but for some reason he got really emotional and clung to me,” says Pip.
His memorial service was on the day he had been meant to return. “[Pip] was so broken,” says an ABC colleague. Her friends stepped up. Lisa Miller came from Washington, Sally Sara from Afghanistan, and they stayed for weeks, sleeping in her bed with her. It had been, says Cathie, “a love affair”. “We were always
just enveloped in this full-on love,”
Pip reflects. “We didn’t have kids. We were just a very, very tight little family of him and I and our cats.”
They had lived and worked together, gone on the road, had adventures. “For months I expected to see John walking down the hallway and coming around the corner. Every time I saw a cameraman with a tripod over his shoulder and carrying his camera, my heart would just stop. So it did take a long time to accept that it was actually true. Being at work was heartbreaking in that first year or two because I just expected to see him all the time.”
Pip learned that grief is not a straight line of stages. “You experience all these different feelings, but they don’t come in a set order and they don’t last a set time. You can experience them multiple times, or one or two at a time. It is a roller-coaster.”
She has learned to “accommodate” it, but she adds succinctly, “closure is bullshit, sorry. There is not a day when I don’t think of him. I wish he had never been picked for that job, which was a nod to his talent.”
Yet gradually the people who wrote, sent flowers and held her began to heal
Pip. “One farmer said his wife never cooked anything for him, but she cooked for me. They sent food, and one offered me a horse I had admired.”
It meant everything to her and still does. “I get more hugs than any girl has ever gotten in her life from these lovely farmers. The thing that I have learned is that when in doubt, make the phone call, send the card – you never know when that call or card or bunch of flowers or casserole is going to make a big difference. A lot of people think, ‘I’ll just leave it to family and friends, I won’t interfere.’ But I heard from complete strangers, school buddies, old riding buddies, journos. Every reaching-out moment helped spread the load. So lean into it. You don’t have to say anything profound. Just say, ‘I’m here for you. I’m thinking of you.’”
It is the golden hour, the perfect light, and Pip is standing in a paddock with long grass, cow dung and a camera. Carrying her sorrow but effervescent, reflecting the light. As much a part of rural Australia as this quintessential scene she is standing in.
Landline airs on Sundays at 12.30pm on ABC TV and iview.